When you comfort eat you are trying to comfort some sort of feeling or emotion that you are experiencing. Comfort eating is most likely to happen at night time. During the day your conscious mind can keep stuff at bay and not think about it, but in the evening at the end of a long hard day it tires and everything is free to come up to the surface. So you experience what is called emotional hunger. You feel the need to eat something to comfort how you feel. Your stomach will oblige by complying with your subconscious, telling you its empty. You think you need food.
The difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger is this. Physical hunger is the kind of hunger that creeps up on you after several hours of going without food. Your body is hungry and requires some fuel. This kind of hunger is ok. You can feed your body then if you wish to. Emotional hunger is the kind of hunger that suddenly springs on you when you walk past a bakery window and see all the pastries, cakes and buns and suddenly you are ravenous with hunger (in fact you probably became hungry just now when I mentioned pastries, cakes and buns! ). One moment you weren’t thinking about food and the next you are insatiable, drooling at the mouth! Why is that? One reason is that we associate putting things into our mouths to comfort us, to make ourselves feel better. This is not just limited to food. It may be alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, sweets or even your thumb! Some of this is instinctive and more of it is learned as children. When a baby cries we put a soother or bottle into the baby’s mouth to suck on. Food is also given as a reward in school. A child is given sweets for coming first in a test etc. We continue this in adulthood by celebrating events with parties.
This is because at the base of the skull at the top of the spine there is a gland called the hypothalamus. This reacts to thought. When you think food, it immediately secretes chemicals into your blood-stream demanding that you satisfy that urge. The thing is that after 20 minutes it switches off that chemical reaction regardless of whether you’ve eaten food or not. If you distract yourself with something else the hypothalamus forgets about the hunger. Since it was never real hunger in the first place you are not depriving your body anyway.
Paul Gill Hypnotherapist and Coach
Paul [email protected] www.paulgill.ie (086 ) 1054813
